Exercise Today And In 30 Years You Will Be Young
People over 70 who have been exercising for 50 years show a physical state comparable to that of a healthy person in their 40s.
The muscles of women and men in their 70s who have exercised regularly for three decades are just as strong and healthy as those of 25-year-olds.
A study, carried out by researchers at Ball State University, in Indiana (United States), concludes that these people also have much higher aerobic capacities than most people their age, which makes them biologically about 30 years younger .
With 70 years as if they were 40
Other studies have found that older people who play sports have healthier muscles, brains, immune systems and hearts than people of the same age who are sedentary.
The idea that we have of old age as a state of fragility, illness and dependence is given by observing what happens in the mean of the population.
In addition, our gaze is always directed towards what represents a threat to our well-being. Older and healthy people go unnoticed to us more than sick people.
They started doing sports with the jogging boom
Dr. Scott Trappe studied the current fitness of people who began exercising in the 1970s with the jogging boom. These people had hobbies like running, cycling, swimming, or other types of exercise for the past 50 years.
Trappe selected 28 people, 7 of them women, and compared them with another group of people his age who had not exercised and with a group of active twentysomethings. The researchers took tissue samples and examined their aerobic capacity, among other variables of their physical condition.
Muscles as healthy as 20-year-olds
A priori, the scientists expected that young people would show more robust muscles and greater aerobic capacity, but they found that the muscles of older athletes resembled those of young people, their aerobic capacity was only slightly lower and 40% superior to that of their inactive peers.
In fact, they found that the aerobic capacity of the elderly corresponded to that of active 40-year-olds.
In conclusion, Trappe argues that the physical deterioration that we associate with aging is not inevitable.
